Thursday, November 12, 2015

How Education Policy Went Astray

Half
a century ago, President Johnson signed a law—now known as No Child
Left Behind—that he believed would solve inequality. But achievement
gaps have only grown.

President Lyndon Johnson

Fifty years ago, on
April 11, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson went back to his old
schoolhouse next to the Pedernales River in Stonewall, Texas, to sign
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as the ESEA. Kate
Deadrich Loney, one of Johnson’s former schoolteachers, sat beside him,
as did a group of Mexican Americans who were students of the president
when he worked as a teacher.

The legislation
constituted a huge expansion in the role of the federal government in
the classroom, an area of public policy that had traditionally been left
to state and local governments. At the heart of the legislation was
Title I, the section of the program that earmarked federal funding for
poor children—a provision that is still in effect today and whose
parameters continue to figure as a perennial subject of debate in
Congress. The section stipulated the distribution of funds to state
education departments, which then allocated the money to school
districts with the highest concentration of low-income children. "By
passing this bill," Johnson said upon signing the legislation, "we
bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million
educationally deprived children." And this was one of several measures
passed that year that aimed to provide better education: Head Start, for
example, offered preschool programs for low-income families, while the
Higher Education Act set aside federal funding to support aspiring
college students.

"As the son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty."

But
the president did not end up accomplishing his goal. Despite the
hundreds of millions of federal dollars spent, the widespread challenges
faced by children from low-income families in America remain
extraordinarily difficult to tackle as they continue to struggle with
vastly inadequate educational opportunities. Schools remain underfunded
and poorly staffed. The quality of education is often poor, and their
teachers are typically overburdened as they deal with the broader range
of environmental factors that take a toll on student achievement. Since
2001, the government’s tendency toward focusing on the creation of
national standards to measure school achievement, rather than the
provision of resources, has also had negative consequences. The
high-school dropout rate for children from lower-income families is much
higher than it is for wealthier students. In 2012, The New York Times
reported that since the 1960s the gap in standardized test scores
between kids from lower- and higher-income families had risen by 40
percent.

The correlation between today’s shortcomings
in federal education policy and efforts to reduce funding for people in
poverty reveals that the country has moved too far away from Johnson’s
original vision. Johnson framed the ESEA as a policy designed to divvy
up financial resources so that local schools had the money they needed
to educate students. The administration, along with the liberals in
Congress, also spoke of the education policy as part of a broader
package of reforms. All these pieces ideally comprised what Johnson
dubbed a "Great Society," where the government would offer a holistic
agenda of programs that could reinvigorate entire communities. As they
saw it, education was connected to civil rights, urban development,
anti-poverty initiatives, and more. Without providing government support
for programs that reduced social inequality, they figured, true
education reform would never work.

Johnson’s
personal experiences surely informed his understanding of education.
"As the son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid
passport from poverty," he said upon signing the education bill. When he
was a 20-year-old student at Southwest Texas State University, he took a
job in Cotulla teaching the children of Mexican American farmworkers,
kids who couldn’t afford to bring lunch to school. This experience, he
said, emphasized for him the importance of educational opportunity in
giving mobility to lower-income Americans. Once he was elected to office
and as the battle for civil rights heated up in the early 1960s, he
approached education as an essential part of the quest for racial
equality. While he was the Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s, the
federal government had already taken on a bigger role in higher
education, in large part because the Soviet launch of the Sputnik
satellite embarrassed the U.S., eventually prompting legislation in 1958
that authorized about $800 million in federal funding for colleges and
universities. That included money for loans, research, and teaching
programs.

Johnson’s approach to education policy also
grew out of political disputes over federal legislation. Liberal
Democrats had been pushing for federal support for the construction of
schools since the 1950s; as a result of the Baby Boom, many schools were
overcrowded and understaffed. Some schools constructed cheap prefab
trailer annexes to house the kids, while in some districts
administrators staggered the schedule, breaking kids into shifts so they
could come in at different times of the day.

But
whenever these politicians proposed federal assistance, that
legislation traditionally ran into two obstacles: those presented by
both southern and northern, urban Democrats. The former opposed any
federal intervention into schools because they feared it would allow the
government to deal with race relations—a problem that fell away after
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then they wanted the money.
"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed anyway," one administration
official reasoned when lobbying a group of southern Democrats for the
education bill. The Civil Rights Act included a provision to withhold
federal funds from government organizations that remained segregated.
Meanwhile, the latter wanted money for private Catholic schools, which
were essential to the constituencies of many liberal Democrats in cities
like New York but weren’t eligible for the federal school-construction
funding. Protestant and Jewish Democrats feared this arrangement
would’ve violated the separation of church and state.

The
emphasis on education as a social right emerged out of the political
knot concerning the Catholic-schools debate. The solution, cooked up by
proponents of education reform like the Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, was
to focus on poverty. Morse, a former law-school dean and the chairman of
the Subcommittee on Education of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare
Committee, pushed for a student-centered approach to federal policy.
This approach eschewed the emphasis on all schools’ infrastructure
problems (such as the construction of buildings) and instead focused on
the needs of the students from poor families (such as money targeted for
kids in low-income districts). In other words, the government wouldn’t
provide money for buildings but rather for programs to help students who
lacked sufficient resources, and some of this money could go toward
students enrolled in private Catholic schools. When this compromise
emerged Johnson jumped on it; the proposal—which would become the basis
for the ESEA—fulfilled his broader vision of what public education
should entail.

Johnson
pushed the legislation through Congress with the help of civil-rights
activists, whose cause he saw as intertwined with education reform. On
January 15, 1965, he told Martin Luther King over the phone: "We've got
to try with every force at our command—and I mean every force—to get
these education bills that go to those people under $2,000 a year
income." With the help of congressional politicians like the Kentucky
Representative Carl Perkins, the bill moved through the House and Senate
despite continued resistance from Republicans.

The law
constituted a historic intervention of federal power into elementary-
and secondary-school education. In addition to Title I, the Title II
section authorized $100 million for library material and textbooks;
Title III, meanwhile, authorized another $100 million for supplementary
education services, including labs, vocational classes, and mobile
libraries.

But the legislation, as Johnson seemed to
recognize, wouldn't suffice without further reforms. At the time that
Congress passed this education legislation, it was approving a slate of
other domestic programs to expand opportunities for the middle class,
such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the War on
Poverty, rent subsidies for low-income housing, Medicare and Medicaid,
food stamps, the Model Cities program, and the Urban Mass Transportation
Act.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, according to Elizabeth Casico and Sarah Reber in their chapter in Legacies of the War on Poverty,
federal spending through Title I diminished the differences between
poorer and wealthier districts. The legislation also provided the
federal government with leverage so it could ensure the desegregation of
southern schools.

While the basic vision behind the
ESEA was sound, the policy also introduced new problems. For one, the
legislation did not provide for adequate oversight of how money was
used, and the guidelines governing how funds would be allocated and
applied were poorly crafted, so in coming decades many school
administrators would use the money for purposes other than they were
intended—a practice that continues to this day in some districts. Money
that was supposed to be used for new programs helping poor children was
instead taken to cover funding gaps in the budget.

More
importantly, however, the conservative backlash against the Great
Society (which started as early as the 1966 midterm elections) undercut
the liberals’ effort to pass the rest of his agenda, including greater
funding for anti-poverty initiatives and robust urban redevelopment
programs, and resulted in budgetary cuts to existing domestic programs
like that outlined in the Economic Opportunity Act. According to
Johnson, inferior schooling was only one challenge facing children
living in poor communities, and educational enhancements couldn’t have
the intended impact unless other barriers were lifted. Classroom
improvement was contingent on improvements to housing and other aspects
of community life.

But
as the costs of Vietnam escalated, congressional conservatives forced
Johnson to choose between guns (military spending) or butter (domestic
spending) taking a toll on efforts to enhance the living situations of
poor kids. In the tug-of-war that ensued the White House made the war
its priority. As a result, political attention to the environments in
which students lived only diminished. Conservative policymakers during
the Reagan era prompted further policy shifts, pushing priorities away
from what they criticized as reckless welfare spending.

Years
later, when a Republican president, George W. Bush, teamed up with the
Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy to fix federal education
policy in 2001, they didn’t end up making things better for the students
themselves. The policymakers who helped craft that legislation
apparently didn’t give much attention to Johnson’s original vision: that
education reform would only work if the government dealt with the
entire host of problems confronting the poor. The realization that
education reform could only work packaged within a set of policies to
combat economic inequality disappeared. The product of that bipartisan
compromise—The No Child Left Behind Act, the present-day iteration of
the ESEA—sought to impose standards rather than provide resources.

The
new testing measures that were implemented to measure whether teachers
and administrators were meeting those standards have done little to help
the children in the classroom. In The Washington Post, Valerie
Strauss recounted the many ways in which testing hurt the classroom
experience, ranging from the time that was lost to learning for test
preparation to resources being diverted from other educational
initiatives. A number of schools were forced to close as a result of not
meeting testing standards, many of them in African American and
immigrant communities. The emphasis on federal testing strained states
where schools remain strapped for money, and the quality of education
has arguably diminished—in large part because these measures incentivize
teachers to gear their instruction toward standardized tests rather
than meaningful, applicable material. Nor does testing address the
conditions of social inequality that play a huge role in determining how
students will do in the classroom.

The
Obama Administration has continued to embrace these policies through
its support of the Common Core standards, a controversial program that
creates benchmarks that states can then test against to assess
proficiency and ensure accountability; some parents are revolting by opting out.

Now
new threats to education have approached as Republicans in Congress
push for cuts to the federal budget, including steep reductions in Pell
grant funding that would further reduce the resources available to poor
Americans seeking a higher education.

The country has moved too far away from Johnson’s original vision.

What
is the government to do? Most important will be to return to the more
holistic approach through which Johnson and liberals of that era
envisioned social policy. Education was always part of a bigger package
they were fighting for. Education was part of the Great Society where
other programs dealt with issues like health care and the reinvigoration
of cities. Without a living wage or better public housing and stronger
civic institutions, all the education policies in the world will only
have a limited effect on poor communities.

In his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, about the loss of social mobility for low-income children, the Harvard scholar Robert Putnam analyzes how the conditions of lower-income communities have eroded
the ability of education to act as a leveling social force. Besides the
enormous disparities in the programs offered by wealthier and poorer
schools, such as after-school programs, lower-income children often come
from communities where there is less social awareness and support from
family and peer groups for moving through educational institutions
successfully. The education gap, he writes, "is created more by what
happens to kids before they get to school, by things that happen outside
of school, and by what kids bring (or don’t bring) with them to
school—some bringing resources and others bringing challengers—than by
what schools do to them." The University of California professor
Meredith Phillips, meanwhile, showed that affluent kids tend to
participate in day care and extracurricular school programs for 1,300
more hours than do lower-income kids before they reach age 6.

To improve the current policy, Congress must move forward with the current bill in the Senate
that revises the No Child Left Behind Act through a reauthorization of
the ESEA. While the legislation leaves in place the testing standards
and punitive measures for failing schools, it creates a better framework
for evaluating what a "failing school" actually is. The legislation
gives states more flexibility in determining how to handle schools that
are struggling with test scores. Senators Lamar Alexander, a Republican
from Tennessee, and Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, introduced
this bill after legislation in the House was stifled earlier this year.

Education
reform will only work if the White House and Congress find the will to
take up the problem of economic inequality. Without programs to diminish
this problem—such as a higher federal minimum wage, legislation to
prevent employers from interfering in union elections that can boost
membership, and more federal funding for early childhood
education—schools serving lower-income children will continue to be
housed in struggling communities that don’t provide kids with the social
or economic resources that they need to succeed. The government also
needs to take a much more aggressive approach to providing incentives
for talented college graduates to think about teaching as their future
vocation.

Ever since Congress passed its historic
legislation in 1965, partisan wrangles and disputes over spending
priorities have pushed the government off course. It’s up to voters to
pressure the 2016 candidates to outline how they plan to get the country
back on track.

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Why This Blog?

So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

I have listened to so many commentaries over the years about what should be done to improve Kentucky's schools - written largely by folks who have never tried to manage a classroom, run a school, or close an achievement gap. I came to believe that I might have something to offer.

I moved, in 1985, from suburban northern Kentucky to what was then the state’s flagship district - Fayette County. I have had a unique set of experiences to accompany my journey through KERA’s implementation. I have seen children grow to graduate and lead successful lives. I have seen them go to jail and I have seen them die. I have been amazed by brilliant teachers, dismayed by impassive bureaucrats, disappointed by politicians and uplifted by some of Kentucky’s finest school children. When I am not complaining about it, I will attest that public school administration is critically important work.

Democracy is run by those who show up. In our system of government every citizen has a voice, but only if they choose to use it.

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On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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